V2PE: Improving Multimodal Long-Context Capability of Vision-Language Models with Variable Visual Position Encoding

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising capabilities in handling various multimodal tasks, yet they struggle in long-context scenarios, particularly in tasks involving videos, high-resolution images, or lengthy image-text documents. In our work, we first conduct an empirical analysis of the long-context capabilities of VLMs using our augmented long-context multimodal datasets. Our findings reveal that directly applying the positional encoding mechanism used for textual tokens to visual tokens is suboptimal, and VLM performance degrades sharply when the position encoding exceeds the model's context window. To address this, we propose Variable Visual Position Encoding (V2PE), a novel positional encoding approach that employs variable and smaller increments for visual tokens, enabling more efficient management of long multimodal sequences. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of V2PE to enhances VLMs' ability to effectively understand and reason over long multimodal contexts. We further integrate V2PE with our augmented long-context multimodal datasets to fine-tune the open-source VLM, InternVL2. The fine-tuned model achieves strong performance on both standard and long-context multimodal tasks. Notably, when the sequence length of the training dataset is increased to 256K tokens, the model is capable of processing multimodal sequences up to 1M tokens, highlighting its potential for real-world long-context applications.

UF-HOBI at "Discharge Me!": A Hybrid Solution for Discharge Summary Generation Through Prompt-based Tuning of GatorTronGPT Models

Automatic generation of discharge summaries presents significant challenges due to the length of clinical documentation, the dispersed nature of patient information, and the diverse terminology used in healthcare. This paper presents a hybrid solution for generating discharge summary sections as part of our participation in the "Discharge Me!" Challenge at the BioNLP 2024 Shared Task. We developed a two-stage generation method using both extractive and abstractive techniques, in which we first apply name entity recognition (NER) to extract key clinical concepts, which are then used as input for a prompt-tuning-based GatorTronGPT model to generate coherent text for two important sections including "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions". Our system was ranked 5th in this challenge, achieving an overall score of 0.284. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid solution in improving the quality of automated discharge section generation.

Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models

We introduce Seed-TTS, a family of large-scale autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) models capable of generating speech that is virtually indistinguishable from human speech. Seed-TTS serves as a foundation model for speech generation and excels in speech in-context learning, achieving performance in speaker similarity and naturalness that matches ground truth human speech in both objective and subjective evaluations. With fine-tuning, we achieve even higher subjective scores across these metrics. Seed-TTS offers superior controllability over various speech attributes such as emotion and is capable of generating highly expressive and diverse speech for speakers in the wild. Furthermore, we propose a self-distillation method for speech factorization, as well as a reinforcement learning approach to enhance model robustness, speaker similarity, and controllability. We additionally present a non-autoregressive (NAR) variant of the Seed-TTS model, named $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$, which utilizes a fully diffusion-based architecture. Unlike previous NAR-based TTS systems, $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$ does not depend on pre-estimated phoneme durations and performs speech generation through end-to-end processing. We demonstrate that this variant achieves comparable performance to the language model-based variant and showcase its effectiveness in speech editing. We encourage readers to listen to demos at \url{https://bytedancespeech.github.io/seedtts_tech_report}.

NC-SDF: Enhancing Indoor Scene Reconstruction Using Neural SDFs with View-Dependent Normal Compensation

State-of-the-art neural implicit surface representations have achieved impressive results in indoor scene reconstruction by incorporating monocular geometric priors as additional supervision. However, we have observed that multi-view inconsistency between such priors poses a challenge for high-quality reconstructions. In response, we present NC-SDF, a neural signed distance field (SDF) 3D reconstruction framework with view-dependent normal compensation (NC). Specifically, we integrate view-dependent biases in monocular normal priors into the neural implicit representation of the scene. By adaptively learning and correcting the biases, our NC-SDF effectively mitigates the adverse impact of inconsistent supervision, enhancing both the global consistency and local details in the reconstructions. To further refine the details, we introduce an informative pixel sampling strategy to pay more attention to intricate geometry with higher information content. Additionally, we design a hybrid geometry modeling approach to improve the neural implicit representation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NC-SDF outperforms existing approaches in terms of reconstruction quality.

ARO: Large Language Model Supervised Robotics Text2Skill Autonomous Learning

Robotics learning highly relies on human expertise and efforts, such as demonstrations, design of reward functions in reinforcement learning, performance evaluation using human feedback, etc. However, reliance on human assistance can lead to expensive learning costs and make skill learning difficult to scale. In this work, we introduce the Large Language Model Supervised Robotics Text2Skill Autonomous Learning (ARO) framework, which aims to replace human participation in the robot skill learning process with large-scale language models that incorporate reward function design and performance evaluation. We provide evidence that our approach enables fully autonomous robot skill learning, capable of completing partial tasks without human intervention. Furthermore, we also analyze the limitations of this approach in task understanding and optimization stability.

Narrative Feature or Structured Feature? A Study of Large Language Models to Identify Cancer Patients at Risk of Heart Failure

Cancer treatments are known to introduce cardiotoxicity, negatively impacting outcomes and survivorship. Identifying cancer patients at risk of heart failure (HF) is critical to improving cancer treatment outcomes and safety. This study examined machine learning (ML) models to identify cancer patients at risk of HF using electronic health records (EHRs), including traditional ML, Time-Aware long short-term memory (T-LSTM), and large language models (LLMs) using novel narrative features derived from the structured medical codes. We identified a cancer cohort of 12,806 patients from the University of Florida Health, diagnosed with lung, breast, and colorectal cancers, among which 1,602 individuals developed HF after cancer. The LLM, GatorTron-3.9B, achieved the best F1 scores, outperforming the traditional support vector machines by 39%, the T-LSTM deep learning model by 7%, and a widely used transformer model, BERT, by 5.6%. The analysis shows that the proposed narrative features remarkably increased feature density and improved performance.

Enhancing RAW-to-sRGB with Decoupled Style Structure in Fourier Domain

RAW to sRGB mapping, which aims to convert RAW images from smartphones into RGB form equivalent to that of Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, has become an important area of research. However, current methods often ignore the difference between cell phone RAW images and DSLR camera RGB images, a difference that goes beyond the color matrix and extends to spatial structure due to resolution variations. Recent methods directly rebuild color mapping and spatial structure via shared deep representation, limiting optimal performance. Inspired by Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, which distinguishes image restoration and enhancement, we present a novel Neural ISP framework, named FourierISP. This approach breaks the image down into style and structure within the frequency domain, allowing for independent optimization. FourierISP is comprised of three subnetworks: Phase Enhance Subnet for structural refinement, Amplitude Refine Subnet for color learning, and Color Adaptation Subnet for blending them in a smooth manner. This approach sharpens both color and structure, and extensive evaluations across varied datasets confirm that our approach realizes state-of-the-art results. Code will be available at ~\url{https://github.com/alexhe101/FourierISP}.

Cascade Speculative Drafting for Even Faster LLM Inference

Speculative decoding enhances the efficiency of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a draft model to draft for a larger target model to review. However, drafting in speculative decoding involves slow autoregressive generation and generating tokens of different importance with the same time allocation. These two inefficiencies lead to its suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce Cascade Speculative Drafting (CS. Drafting), a novel approach that employs two types of cascades. The Vertical Cascade eliminates autoregressive generation from neural models. The Horizontal Cascade constitutes efficient time allocation in drafting with its optimality supported by our theoretical analysis. Combining both cascades, our CS. Drafting algorithm has achieved up to 72 percent additional speedup over speculative decoding in our experiments while keeping the same output distribution.

Efficient Title Reranker for Fast and Improved Knowledge-Intense NLP

We introduce Efficient Title Reranker via Broadcasting Query Encoder, a novel title reranking technique to achieve efficient title reranking 20x-40x faster than vanilla passage reranker. However, one of the challenges with the training of Efficient Title Reranker is the instability. Analyzing the issue, we found some very difficult ground truths might act as noisy labels causing accuracy to drop as well as some extreme values in model probability output causing nan. To address these issues, we introduce the Sigmoid Trick, a novel technique that reduces the gradient update of both cases resulting in better retrieval efficacy. Experiments showed the effectiveness of ETR and sigmoid trick as we achieved four state-of-the-art positions on the kilt knowledge benchmark.

MatChat: A Large Language Model and Application Service Platform for Materials Science

The prediction of chemical synthesis pathways plays a pivotal role in materials science research. Challenges, such as the complexity of synthesis pathways and the lack of comprehensive datasets, currently hinder our ability to predict these chemical processes accurately. However, recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GAI), including automated text generation and question-answering systems, coupled with fine-tuning techniques, have facilitated the deployment of large-scale AI models tailored to specific domains. In this study, we harness the power of the LLaMA2-7B model and enhance it through a learning process that incorporates 13,878 pieces of structured material knowledge data. This specialized AI model, named MatChat, focuses on predicting inorganic material synthesis pathways. MatChat exhibits remarkable proficiency in generating and reasoning with knowledge in materials science. Although MatChat requires further refinement to meet the diverse material design needs, this research undeniably highlights its impressive reasoning capabilities and innovative potential in the field of materials science. MatChat is now accessible online and open for use, with both the model and its application framework available as open source. This study establishes a robust foundation for collaborative innovation in the integration of generative AI in materials science.